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You've just been asked to serve as the assistant classroom mother for your son's fifth-grade class.

They asked you because you're a stay-at-home mom, but you're caring for an aging parent, you teach an adult Sunday school class, and you volunteer part-time at a homeless shelter. Frankly, you're pooped.

Here's what you do.

Tell them you'd love to, but you don't want to go through the criminal background check.

Many schools these days require full-fledged criminal background checks for all volunteers at their schools, including parents.

Robert Smith was stunned to learn that he had to submit to a criminal background check to attend his kindergarten son's field day and watch the kid jump around in a burlap sack.

Smith wasn't concerned about what the check would turn up. He's already submitted to them to serve as a Boy Scout leader and a Sunday school teacher.

It was a privacy issue.

"There go more of our civil rights," he said.

Smith did submit under protest, and he was grateful that school officials ran the check in 24 hours rather than the two weeks or more that the check often takes.

He said he was later told he could have attended without clearance, but unlike the other parents he would have to stay in a restricted area behind a fence.

West University Elementary will also require criminal background checks of any parents who wish to join their children at next week's End of the Year celebration at nearby Colonial Park.

West U. Elementary Principal John Threet says background checks at such events are important because lots of parents and grandparents attend and can't be monitored by teachers and staff.

"A child might ask an adult to take him to the bathroom," he said.

Threet admitted that he doesn't know of any case in which a parent harmed someone else's child while attending a campus event.

"I'm not going to take any chances," he said. "I'm going to be proactive."

Although he may be one of the most expansive in requiring background checks, he's hardly alone in doing so. I checked with three other school districts besides Houston ISD — Fort Bend, Katy and Spring Branch — and all require all volunteers, including parents, to submit to background checks.

Katy was one of the more lenient. Janet Theis, director of the district's Partner's in Education Department, said volunteers who meet with students one-on-one weekly as tutors and mentors underwent background checks, but not volunteers for more casual events.

Spring Branch ISD has had the requirement in place since about 1990, officials said.

One official said even speakers at career days were required to go through it. But District Police Chief Charles Brawner said that wasn't so. (I had asked if even astronauts and policemen went through the check for career days.)

Coming on campus for one-time events such as career days doesn't trigger the checks, he said, but the district runs about 9,000 volunteer checks a year for volunteers ranging from tutors to field trip chaperones.

"We get maybe 200 to 250 rejections a year," he said.

He said people with murder and other serious felonies or with sex crimes are excluded as volunteers, but he doesn't exclude someone who had a marijuana offense in college and is now 35 with no other criminal history.

"I had a parent who in her younger years was an exotic dancer and had some arrests," he said. "But that was 12 to 15 years ago and there's been nothing since. She's gotten married and had children and wanted to volunteer. I cleared her."

He said he even allows sex offenders into the schools, though they are monitored.

"They still should have some involvement in the school," he said. "The more they're involved, the better their children do in school."

To me, that's the key issue. Especially in low-income areas, teachers work hard to increase parental involvement. Yet subjecting people to criminal background checks can make it even more difficult to involve them.

The president of a parent-teacher association in a low-income area of Pearland, who asked not to be named, said more than 130 parents signed up to volunteer, but only about 10 filled out the forms authorizing a criminal background check.

She said it wasn't clear how many were discouraged by the forms' difficulty and how many were put off by the check itself.

It seems to me that we are paying a high price — in educational benefits, privacy and in some districts, money — to combat a problem that as far as I can tell nobody has demonstrated to exist.

A state law passed by the last Legislature appears to recognize that. It requires criminal background checks for all school volunteers — except parents, grandparents and guardians of students.